SpaceX lands NASA launch for 'Armageddon'-style Earth defense probe

The near-Earth asteroid (185851) 2000 DP107 was the first binary asteroid ever imaged by radar. This animation is derived from planetary radar observations. A similar asteroid pairing, Didymos, will be the target of NASA's DART mission.

In the mission to defend Earth from asteroids, NASA is going with SpaceX.

SpaceX has landed a launch contract for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, in which NASA would slam a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to change its trajectory.

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It’s not quite sending Bruce Willis and a surly crew of ocean drillers on a space shuttle with a nuclear bomb or two to save the Earth, but it’s a start.

This is the first-ever mission of its kind for NASA. The target is also unique, a small asteroid that actually orbits a larger one. The parent asteroid is the 800-meter wide Didymos, with is smaller orbiting moon asteroid, a 150-meter wide object, as the target for DART.

NASA refers to the chunk of metal slamming into rock as a kinetic impactor, with the probe moving at 6 km per second. An on-board camera and autonomous navigation software will assist in the strike, which hypothetically should shift the orbiting asteroid a fraction of 1%, but enough to be measured using telescopes from Earth.

The mission is slated for June 2021 launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. That’s well ahead of the planned October 2022 impact when Didymos and its target moon pass within 11 million km of Earth.

NASA is paying $69 million to SpaceX for the contract, which is lower than the $95 million SpaceX charges roughly for defense contract launches.

The launch will be managed out of NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center while the DART Project is conceived by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

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